Insidious - A New Book On Internal Fraud And Why We Wrote It
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Today, we are excited to announce the availability of Insidious – How Trusted Employees Steal Millions and Why It's So Hard for Banks to Stop Them, a new book I co-authored with BC Krishna, that provides insight into a critical problem plaguing banks today: employee fraud.
After combating employee fraud for many years, we realized how little awareness and dialog there is in the industry about this issue. In other areas of financial crime (e.g., check fraud, or payment card fraud), there are definitions, means to share confidential loss data, discussions regarding best practices and many other collaborative outlets. But mention employee fraud, and nobody really wants to talk about it. There are no industry definitions with regards to various types of internal fraud, no standard measurement criteria, and certainly no regularly scheduled discussions with regard to monitoring employees or best practices for doing so. People discuss internal fraud in hushed tones - which is certainly to the advantage of the bad guys!
Most corporate security and fraud professionals at banks have a general sense that employee fraud is a problem. But there's a lot about the issue that is poorly understood: the variety of schemes (in the book we divide them into three broad categories), its prevalence in the organization, the value gained from mitigation, the relationship between internal and external events (identity theft and account takeover), the role of insiders in collusive crime rings, the types of people committing these crimes The list is long, and we've attempted to provide some perspective on these issues and more.
And, as I say in today's press release: "Insider bank fraud is a deeply personal problem, when you consider that many times individuals are literally stealing from their neighbors, friends and family. It is not only an illegal act, but also a betrayal of friendships, professionalism and public trust. We address this topic in the book because there is almost no meaningful information in the public domain about this problem, and there is a real need to educate the public and the industry on its scope and impact.
It's time to let employee fraud out of the closet, and begin an open dialog about the issue. Only then can we gain a better understanding, and make progress towards minimizing this threat. And that's why we wrote Insidious. To educate the industry, to encourage open dialog, and ultimately better protect financial institutions and their customers.
If you get an opportunity to read a summary, an excerpt or the entire book (go here for all 3), we'd love to hear your feedback.